How To Make A Mockery Of Your Own Law School: Sue Your Critics

from the oops dept

Someone named "tuna" was the first of a few of you to point us to the ongoing debacle that is the Thomas M. Cooley Law School. Apparently administrators there aren't too happy about the fact that some of its students were not pleased with the school, and gave the school negative reviews online. So, rather than responding to the complaints or figuring out ways to improve, the school filed a lawsuit to determine the identity of four anonymous people online who wrote mean things about the Thomas M. Cooley Law School. One of the anonymous people has filed a motion to quash against the school's efforts:

"In contrast to their own mission statement, Cooley Law School is now seeking to use its power to stymie the constitutional right of free speech of its own students -- albeit speech that negatively portrays the school consistent with other empirical data," Berkley attorney John Hermann said in the motion, filed on behalf of his client, Rockstar05. "Ironically, Cooley is now the emperor who appears angry at being told he is not wearing any clothes."

The school itself publicized this particular lawsuit, as well as a separate lawsuit against some lawyers who claimed to be putting together a class action lawsuit against Cooley over (the lawyers claimed) "manipulating post-graduate employment data and salary info." You can see both complaints embedded below.

I have no idea if the statements made by anyone targeted by Cooley rise to the level of defamation. Certainly many of the statements highlighted could be seen as statements of fact, though many appear to be standard hyperbole from someone who had a negative experience. Still, all of this had me wondering about the Cooley Law School, as I have to admit never having heard of it, so I decided to check it out. The law school's biggest claim to fame appears to be that it has the largest faculty, and if you count all of its various students, the largest student body as well. Bigger is better! But is the school any good?

Well, that's where things get hilarious.

You see, if you look at the various rankings for law schools, Cooley is considered near the bottom of the heap. The US News rankings have put it as a "fourth tier" law school, in the past, and currently has it as "unranked" because it apparently "did not supply enough information to U.S. News to calculate a ranking." But, wouldn't you know it, according to Cooley itself, it's actually the second top ranked school in the country, behind only Harvard.

How's that? Well, you see, Cooley's administration decided to create its own rankings system! A report from last year (at which point Cooley ranked merely #12 on its own ranking criteria, demolished the way Cooley's own rankings system works:

How did they arrive at this order? Cooley can only make this claim by sufficiently broadening the number of factors and then allotting them equal weight. Traditionally, highly important considerations are GPA, LSAT, Bar passage rate, and employment upon graduation. However, in this scheme they are given the same weight as Total Volumes in Library, Total Applications, Total Law School Square Footage, Program Achievement Rating Rank.

That blog post then goes on to display how Cooley minimizes the importance of the numbers that actually matter. Meanwhile, it appears that some others were similarly flabbergasted by Cooley Law presenting itself as the 2nd highest ranked law school, based on its own silly rankings. Cooley's own rankings explanation says that they got rid of pesky things like "reputation," and declare that, without question, "bigger is better than smaller" (even though, amusingly, in the same list, they claim that smaller class sizes are better than bigger!).

The thing is, I wouldn't have gone out and learned any of this if Cooley hadn't decided to jump and sue some of its critics. Even if some of the statements turn out to be defamatory, suing your critics is an open invitation for people to take a closer look at you and what you do, and what comes up for Thomas M. Cooley Law School does not look good at all.

Is This Where All The Bad Lawyers Come From?

You know all the lawyer jokes? How we all know some pretty lousy lawyers? How some lawyers truly are ambulance chasers?

Is this the kind of school that cranks out these hacks?

Maybe so. Maybe we just have an oversupply of lawyers problem, with a large balloon shaped distribution of crappy attorneys. If so, all those hacks would need to find work, and that goes some way towards explaining the excessively litigious society we have become.

It also might explain some of the logic we've seen from the lawyers in these comments arguing in favor of IP legislation, while not seemingly capable of understanding the true impact of some laws, the economic incentives behind the laws, or even logical debate.

Re: Is This Where All The Bad Lawyers Come From?

Actually, I think the vast majority of lawyers would agree that there are too many lawyers. Our guild is doing a terrible job of ensuring demand always outstrips supply.

Cooley is actually pretty notorious. Third and fourth tier schools tend to have a massive culling after 1st year, where the bottom quarter/third get kicked out, but Cooley is so large that its cull is especially brutal. That being said, the Cooley grads I've known haven't been any worse on average than other lawyers.

I think that the propensity for making arguments which benefit your client without taking into account its effect on society in general is unrelated to the oversupply of attorneys. I think the pro-IP camp is strongly represented by lawyers whose clients are pro-IP. The problem with Regent grads was their ideological uniformity and authoritarian leanings, not their knowledge of the law.

Re:

Exactly. To quote:

"So far, the most damning statement about Cooley’s education has come from Cooley itself. Cooley president Don LeDuc said that the school filed these suits “to protect Cooley’s reputation and stand up for our students and more than 15,000 graduates.”

And yet, of those 15,000 graduates, when it came time to defend Cooley’s reputation, the school went with lawyers who were not educated at Cooley."

This may come as a surprise to some, but suing is basically what a lawyer is suppose to do and their whole lifes are based on that premise, so they will do the only thing they can do and that is to sue others.

If somebody had pissed of a painter they could find themselves being portraited as the devil, if you pissed of the guy who makes your food you may be eating some added bodily fluids, now how do we deal with people who spit on the food of others because they get angry?

Re: Re: Is This Where All The Bad Lawyers Come From?

Holding an LLB myself I would say that it's not a matter of there being too many lawyers/solicitors. It's more a matter of there are too many that are actual practitioners.

There are a large percentage of people who hold law degrees (and mostly they obtain them as mature age students not straight from school) whom like myself do not practice, though use that qualification in other professional ways. In fact I could think of nothing worse then actually being on the bar all day, talking to clients who want to sue because of de minimus booboos, and the paperwork.. blah! [not to mention that I would be likely in contempt more times than not due to my cynical nature and ENTJ personality :P ]

So my opinion is that the market has been oversaturated with litigators whom just don't care anymore, or if they do also need to feed themselves, either their mouths or ego, or both.

The ones who do care, play by all the rules of ethics and common sense, are becoming few and far between and sadly are removing their shingles, or going over to the darkside of advocacy where their are more cookies.

Re: Can they sue themselves for their own bad advice?

Re: Re: Is This Where All The Bad Lawyers Come From?

"simply because you disagree with their stance on God doesnt change their performance as a law school"

No, it just is an affront to the concept separation of church and state when they are so highly represented in government, yet don't seem to have the credentials to merit that level of influence. The credentials appear to be the JC more than the JD.